International Trans-Editing: Typical Intercultural Communication Strategies at the BBC World Service Turkish Radio

Abstract

Whenever a piece of local news is transmitted to the global reader, it is not simply translated into another language, but becomes part of intercultural communication. The main aim in this paper is to investigate how international news stories written in English are prepared for Turkish readers. The comparative analysis of English and Turkish news stories from the BBC World Service’s websites shows that it involves a translating and an editing task, termed as "international trans-editing". This text analysis, along with an interview with the head of the BBC World Service Turkish Radio and participant observation conducted among their trans-editors, permit us to explore the peculiarities of this process and to identify some of its typical patterns.